When Advice is Too Much

I’ve been thinking a lot about advice lately. The way it’s given, how so much of it is unwarranted or isn’t asked for. How so much good advice isn’t taken, and bad advice is doled out as readily as political pamphlets on a university campus.

I was thinking about it, because so much of it is everywhere. Advice on how to eat, drink, dress, vote, or pray. People are posting out of context quotes on their facebook and twitter as though it’s meant to be the first line of some advice bible written by Glenn Beck and Marilyn Monroe.

Advice, a lot of the time, comes across as criticism or judgment, especially when it’s unwarranted. I like to think I’m not as sensitive as some people, but when people give me advice on how to “raise” my kids, I really can take it pretty personally. It makes me feel like they think I don’t know what I’m doing, or what works for my kids.

Then again, I can flip around to Ultimate Hypocrite, and post pages of my own advice on how to deal with other people’s children, and their children’s problems. I have no problem running my mouth when a mother says, “I don’t know how to make my baby stop crying.” or “I can’t get my daughter to sit down and do her homework.”

Maybe it’s because I justify it in my brain as, well they’re asking for advice on how to deal with this issue. I don’t bother to stop and think, what reaction would I have if someone said those exact words to me. Now, that’s not to say I haven’t taken any advice with thanks, because I definitely have.

I had to learn to take advice from my husband, because in several areas, he knows better than I do. Being older than I am, he’s experienced parts of life a few years a head of me and his advice helps prepare me for certain things.

By nature, I’m an anxious hypochondriac. It’s horrible, really, and not at all cute like in a Jason Bateman movie. My brain is constantly whirring with the what-ifs about disease and contamination and death. I’ve spent years building coping skills to deal with these fears and anxieties, so they’re not constantly controlling every move I make.

I’m sure most of you, who have reached the thirty milestone, or at least are hovering near it, will understand exactly what I mean when I say, “That’s the age where things start to creak and pop.” Your body begins to sound like that old, wooden framed recliner that your grandmother has had in her house since La-z-boy first opened its doors.

Your knees pop, your wrists crack, you start to have pains in joints you didn’t know you had. You start to hear words like cholesterol, blood pressure and glucose levels. Your doctor wants to monitor your blood more and you have to start counting your carbs and steps and milligrams of saturated fat.

I had my first “health” scare about six months ago, when I went in for my routine check-up. My doctor said, “Well everything is great…. except.”

Of course my heart sped up and I thought, “Oh god, except what? Cancer?! MRSA?! Some particularly wicked form of hepatitis that you can catch from opening public doors?! Tell me doc! What do I have?!”

High Cholesterol.

Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, he started rambling on about how with my number, I could have an increased risk of heart attack and stroke in five years. Then he said, “And to play devil’s advocate, I wonder, how far are you into that five years now?”

Dear God! I was dying! Suddenly every ache and every pain, every head ache and every bubble of indigestion indicated that I was mid-heart attack or suddenly stroking out. I gobbled Niacin like they were tick tacks, drank three tablespoons of soluble fiber a day and every meal included a bowl of Cheerios on the side.

Then, after letting me freak out for about a week, my husband sat me down and said, “This is what happens when you’re thirty. It just happens. You start feeling aches and pains you’ve never had before. You stop recovering like you were a 21 year old College Junior licking Herpes off of a dorm lolipop. You’re not going to drop dead of a heart attack. Eat better, take your niacin and stop freaking out. I went through the same thing when I turned thirty. Things started hurting that had never hurt before and I thought I was dying. I learned to cope with it. Besides, it’s only going to get worse from here on out.”

Best piece of advice I’d ever been given, and he was right. Not to say that I don’t start panicking a little when I get a pain in my left elbow, or a little bit of heartburn, never mind that it’s on the right side of my lower ribs. I still take his advice and I run with it, because it helped. It was great advice.

There really is a lot out there to be given, and a lot to be taken. The problem is, we’ve been so trained by people who just vomit out some random quote pieced together by poorly cut magazine articles like some ransom note and attributed to Marilyn Monroe or Abraham Lincoln. That, or our well-meaning, but often hateful and know-it-all mothers in law who always most definitely know how to raise a child better.

Someone who is in a very bad situation could be handed a book called, “The Best Advice Ever. Literally” but throw it in the bin and light it on fire because they’re so tired of people spouting out useless random bits of information that doesn’t apply to their life at all. I’ve been there. I’ve been that girl.

I made one, very bad mistake as a seventeen year old girl and the people I knew spent the next ten years trying to give me “advice” on how not to do it again. It felt so condescending that even when I desperately needed advice from someone who had been where I was, I rejected it because “advice” had never helped before.

I honestly think that if people just stopped trying to answer every plea for “help” and maybe listened for the pleas of people who really need the help, a lot of this will stop. I know so many women in so many bad situations that are staying there because they can’t stand to listen to people trying to “help” them anymore.

It saddens me. It infuriates me when I see these nonsense “Copy and Paste if you agree” on facebook because none of that really matters. It’s desensitizing the masses, and no one wants to listen anymore, no matter how much it might help.


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